San Francisco is still one of the reigning tech capitals, according to a 2022 Brookings Institute report analyzing the industry shifts during the pandemic.
But one shift that struck the city is that of remote work. Now, employees at San Francisco-based companies might not even live in the Bay Area, but states away. And that structure is here to stay. In 2021, Initialized, a San Francisco venture fund, found that 42 percent of its firms’ founders would launch their companies remotely if they were starting a business today.
At Moov Financial, the team is fully remote. But the tech culture makes work both visible and accessible to encourage collective learning and growth and to build a tight-knit working relationship that fuels collaboration.
It’s because of that close-from-afar way of working that Moov focuses less on technical skills and more on character when hiring.
“It matters more to us that you’re a good human being who’s passionate about the same things we are, not that you know all the right tools or programming languages,” Chief Technology Officer Joel Tosi said.
Both Moov and machine-learning company Tonic.ai are currently hiring. Tonic.ai is fully remote, too, but the company also maintains an office space in San Francisco’s trendy Mission District. Built In San Francisco sat down with each company to find out more about their tech team culture and the most exciting projects coming down the pipeline.
What they do: Moov Financial makes money movement work. Its payments platform allows businesses, sellers and consumers to accept, store, send and spend money. As a licensed processor, Moov is connected to each payment network, like Visa and MasterCard, which provides more control and transparency to the payments process.
You can’t teach character: “Any skill can be taught. At Moov, we care more about character traits,” Tosi said. The most important character trait Moov looks for in candidates? Being a good person. Tosi asks candidates questions like: “Who are you as a person and what kind of energy do you put into the world?” “Do you exhibit honesty, integrity and generosity?” “Do you question convention, approach problems with creativity, and regularly show gratitude to others?”
“Our team is made up of tinkerers and creatives who are all driven to solve problems,” Tosi said. “We own our work and relentlessly push to make things better, but we don’t try to do it alone. We know we’re better together, which is why we’re forthright about sharing ideas, progress, wins, obstacles and gratitude.”
Filling the open space: Moov’s platform is filling a vacant space in the payments marketplace, and the company has dedicated itself to ensuring the cloud-native platform is built with the best architecture and design principles. “From the beginning, we made it a priority to incorporate all the necessary elements and natively weave in security and CI/CD capabilities,” Tosi said. Moov’s product makes it easy for businesses to accept, store, send and spend money on one platform, so the tech team plans to expand payment modality capabilities to help customers unlock more revenue. And because the team is design-driven, user experience is at the front of their minds. “Expanding capabilities within the platform provides our users with more optionality, and more optionality allows our customers to expand their use of Moov through our single API,” Tosi said.
Building a culture for builders: The word “passion” is thrown around a lot at Moov, which is why tech leadership has carefully crafted a culture where builders thrive. “When work-life balance is respected, leadership openly communicates, and team members regularly lean in and help each other, it creates a passion for the company,” Tosi said. “When engineers teach us how they want to be managed, and their efforts are recognized and celebrated, they become passionate about the work. When smart people are given tough problems to solve and are completely trusted to find the right solutions, they become passionate about exploration. When the same engineers get to see the impact their work has on the product, which in turn, saves other developers so much time, money and frustration, they become passionate about the mission.”
In all, Tosi’s team is passionate about what they’re building, and they take pride in the quality of their work. “Because we sweat the details, iterate often, stay curious and challenge the hell out of our comfort zones, it’s ‘passion’ that sets us apart,” Tosi said.
Fake it ‘til you make it: Tonic.ai’s applications mimics its clients’ production databases to create synthetic data that developers can use in their local environments. The fake data allows developers to protect the privacy of real customer data during the development and testing process.
Not just how, but why: Conly’s team is curious, and that’s what he’s looking for in new engineers. “We look for candidates who are passionate about their work,” Conly said. “They go beyond simply knowing how to use technology and are interested in why technology is built the way it is, have opinions on how it can be made better and constantly strive to know more.”
The engineering team takes a philosophical approach to data analysis and production. They ask thoughtful questions about their work, like if interfaces should be prefixed with an “I,” and if r-value-first comparisons are easier to read. “Our constant curiosity makes us better developers, makes work fun and ensures that we’re always learning,” Conly said.
Taking security to heart: In 2023, Conly’s team will tackle multiple big projects, including optimizing their tech stack. Tonic.ai’s application analyzes, moves, transforms and uses machine learning to synthesize large amounts of data in complex computing environments, so the engineering team will focus on implementing domain-specific solutions that optimize every environment the app runs in to ensure functionality and performance. “The mission of protecting sensitive information is one we take to heart,” Conly said. “The better job we do and the more efficiently we do it, the easier it is to plug in everywhere to make the world a more secure place.”
Own it: Ownership is invaluable to the engineering team. Engineers have the opportunity to make their portion of the application the best it can be. “We hire smart people and give them the context and freedom to make smart decisions that directly impact our customers, our finances, our industry and our world,” Conly said.
